Portal:Culture
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Introduction
Culture (/ˈkʌltʃər/) is the social behavior and norms found in human societies. Culture is considered a central concept in anthropology, encompassing the range of phenomena that are transmitted through social learning in human societies. Cultural universals are found in all human societies; these include expressive forms like art, music, dance, ritual, religion, and technologies like tool usage, cooking, shelter, and clothing. The concept of material culture covers the physical expressions of culture, such as technology, architecture and art, whereas the immaterial aspects of culture such as principles of social organization (including practices of political organization and social institutions), mythology, philosophy, literature (both written and oral), and science comprise the intangible cultural heritage of a society.
In the humanities, one sense of culture as an attribute of the individual has been the degree to which they have cultivated a particular level of sophistication in the arts, sciences, education, or manners. The level of cultural sophistication has also sometimes been seen to distinguish civilizations from less complex societies. Such hierarchical perspectives on culture are also found in class-based distinctions between a high culture of the social elite and a low culture, popular culture, or folk culture of the lower classes, distinguished by the stratified access to cultural capital. In common parlance, culture is often used to refer specifically to the symbolic markers used by ethnic groups to distinguish themselves visibly from each other such as body modification, clothing or jewelry. Mass culture refers to the mass-produced and mass mediated forms of consumer culture that emerged in the 20th century. Some schools of philosophy, such as Marxism and critical theory, have argued that culture is often used politically as a tool of the elites to manipulate the lower classes and create a false consciousness, and such perspectives are common in the discipline of cultural studies. In the wider social sciences, the theoretical perspective of cultural materialism holds that human symbolic culture arises from the material conditions of human life, as humans create the conditions for physical survival, and that the basis of culture is found in evolved biological dispositions.
Selected general articles
A cultural landscape, as defined by the World Heritage Committee, is the "cultural properties [that] represent the combined works of nature and of man."- "a landscape designed and created intentionally by man"
- an "organically evolved landscape" which may be a "relict (or fossil) landscape" or a "continuing landscape"
- an "associative cultural landscape" which may be valued because of the "religious, artistic or cultural associations of the natural element."
The Marxist intellectual Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) developed the theory of cultural hegemony to further the establishment of a working-class worldview.
In Marxist philosophy, cultural hegemony is the domination of a culturally diverse society by the ruling class who manipulate the culture of that society—the beliefs, explanations, perceptions, values, and mores—so that their imposed, ruling-class worldview becomes the accepted cultural norm; the universally valid dominant ideology, which justifies the social, political, and economic status quo as natural and inevitable, perpetual and beneficial for everyone, rather than as artificial social constructs that benefit only the ruling class.
In philosophy and in sociology, the term cultural hegemony has denotations and connotations derived from the Ancient Greek word ἡγεμονία (hegemonia) indicating leadership and rule. In politics, hegemony is the geopolitical method of indirect imperial dominance, with which the hegemon (leader state) rules subordinate states, by the threat of intervention, an implied means of power, rather than by direct military force, that is, invasion, occupation, and annexation. Read more...- Oppositional culture, also known as the ‘’blocked opportunities framework’’ or the “caste theory of education”, is a term most commonly used in studying the sociology of education to explain racial disparities in educational achievement, particularly between white and black Americans. However, the term refers to any subculture's rejection of conformity to prevailing norms and values, not just nonconformity within the educational system. Thus many criminal gangs and religious cults could also be considered oppositional cultures. Read more...
Painting of a turn-of-century trading fair, Hessisches Volksfest (Hessian Folk Festival), 1887, Louis Toussaint (1826-1887), Öl auf Leinwand.
Cultural globalization refers to the transmission of ideas,
meanings, and values around the world in such a way as to extend and intensify social relations. This process is marked by the common consumption of cultures that have been diffused by the Internet, popular culture media, and international travel. This has added to processes of commodity exchange and colonization which have a longer history of carrying cultural meaning around the globe. The circulation of cultures enables individuals to partake in extended social relations that cross national and regional borders. The creation and expansion of such social relations is not merely observed on a material level. Cultural globalization involves the formation of shared norms and knowledge with which people associate their individual and collective cultural identities. It brings increasing interconnectedness among different populations and cultures. Read more...- Cultural leveling is the process by which different cultures approach each other as a result of travel and communication. It can also refer to "the process by which Western culture is being exported and diffused into other nations”. Cultural leveling within the United States has been driven by mass market media such as radio and television broadcasting and nationwide distribution of magazines and catalogs. Some of these means and effects are considered artifacts of the Machine Age of the 1920s and 1930s. Today the interactions between countries worldwide have allowed the opportunity for intercultural dialogue. Countries world wide have undergone a form of cultural leveling. Some countries being more open to it than others. Japan, for example, has assimilated Western styles of dress and music into a blend or Western and Eastern Cultures. Today, due to the crossing or travel and communication with time and space there is just about no “other side of the world” anymore, giving us the inevitable result of what is known as cultural leveling. Eclecticism and cultural leveling both share a similar ideology in the separation of culture from human nature creating the potential risk or enslavement and manipulation. Cultural leveling is notably present in minorities instead of large cultures driven to aspire wealth and there is more commonality present in minorities. At times countercultures and subcultures may pose as a resistance to cultural change within society. Local cultures did diffuse across each other in earlier times as material items hence influencing a change in the cultural atmosphere. These diffusions have been part of most significant cultural changes in recorded history. To convey how fundamental the loss of diversity and the subsequent leveling have been, many sociologists such as Daniel Lerner amplified the opinion through the phrase “the passing of traditional society.” Read more...
The "Spanish Fly", Lytta vesicatoria has been considered to have medicinal, aphrodisiac, and other properties.
Human interactions with insects include both a wide variety of uses, whether practical such as for food, textiles, and dyestuffs, or symbolic, as in art, music, and literature, and negative interactions including serious damage to crops and extensive efforts to eliminate insect pests.
Academically, the interaction of insects and society has been treated in part as cultural entomology, dealing mostly with "advanced" societies, and in part as ethnoentomology, dealing mostly with "primitive" societies, though the distinction is weak and not based on theory. Both academic disciplines explore the parallels, connections and influence of insects on human populations, and vice versa. They are rooted in anthropology and natural history, as well as entomology, the study of insects. Other cultural uses of insects, such as biomimicry, do not necessarily lie within these academic disciplines. Read more...- Culture theory is the branch of comparative anthropology and semiotics (not to be confused with cultural sociology or cultural studies) that seeks to define the heuristic concept of culture in operational and/or scientific terms. Read more...
- Interculturalism refers to support for cross-cultural dialogue and challenging self-segregation tendencies within cultures. Interculturalism involves moving beyond mere passive acceptance of a multicultural fact of multiple cultures effectively existing in a society and instead promotes dialogue and interaction between cultures.
Interculturalism has arisen in response to criticisms of existing policies of multiculturalism, such as criticisms that such policies had failed to create inclusion of different cultures within society, but instead have divided society by legitimizing segregated separate communities that have isolated themselves and accentuated their specificity. It is based on the recognition of both differences and similarities between cultures. It has addressed the risk of the creation of absolute relativism within postmodernity and in multiculturalism. Read more... - Cultural reproduction is the transmission of existing cultural values and norms from generation to generation. Cultural reproduction refers to the mechanisms by which continuity of cultural experience is sustained across time. Cultural reproduction often results in social reproduction, or the process of transferring aspects of society (such as class) from generation to generation.
- Groups of people, notably social classes, act to reproduce the existing social structure to preserve their advantage
- The processes of schooling in modern societies are among the main mechanisms of cultural reproduction, and do not operate solely through what is taught in courses of formal instruction.
The phrase primitive culture is the title of an 1871 book by Edward Burnett Tylor. A defining characteristic of primitive cultures according to Tylor is a greater amount of leisure time than in more complex societies.
In 1953, John Carothers, a colonial psychiatrist who had previously worked at Mathari Mental Hospital in Nairobi, Kenya, published a report for the World Health Organization claiming and quoting several authors that compared African psychology to that of children, to immaturity compared the African mind to a European brain that had undergone a lobotomy. They were caricatures of primitive people at peace with nature, dwelling in a fascinating world of hallucinations and witchdoctors. However, African researchers have dismissed this concept, Thomas Adeoye Lambo, a leading psychiatrist and member of the Yoruba people wrote about the subject that they were glorified pseudo-scientific novels or anecdotes with a subtle racial bias, having so many gaps and inconsistencies, that they can no longer be seriously presented as valuable observations of scientific merit. Even so, views like Carothers's had been echoed over decades of colonialism, becoming so commonplace that they were considered to be somewhat of a truism. Read more...- Cross cultural sensitivity is the knowledge, awareness, and acceptance of other cultures. On the individual level, it allows travelers and workers to successfully navigate a different culture that they are interacting with whereas it is considered one of the primary factors that drive the way organizations behave. Read more...
- Cultural history combines the approaches of anthropology and history to look at popular cultural traditions and cultural interpretations of historical experience. It examines the records and narrative descriptions of past matter, encompassing the continuum of events (occurring in succession and leading from the past to the present and even into the future) pertaining to a culture.
Cultural history records and interprets past events involving human beings through the social, cultural, and political milieu of or relating to the arts and manners that a group favors. Jacob Burckhardt (1818–1897) helped found cultural history as a discipline. Cultural history studies and interprets the record of human societies by denoting the various distinctive ways of living built up by a group of people under consideration. Cultural history involves the aggregate of past cultural activity, such as ceremony, class in practices, and the interaction with locales. Read more...
Culture change is a term used in public policy making that emphasizes the influence of cultural capital on individual and community behavior. It has been sometimes called repositioning of culture, which means the reconstruction of the cultural concept of a society. It places stress on the social and cultural capital determinants of decision making and the manner in which these interact with other factors like the availability of information or the financial incentives facing individuals to drive behavior.
These cultural capital influences include the role of parenting, families and close associates; organizations such as schools and workplaces; communities and neighborhoods; and wider social influences such as the media. It is argued that this cultural capital manifests into specific values, attitudes or social norms which in turn guide the behavioral intentions that individuals adopt in regard to particular decisions or courses of action. These behavioral intentions interact with other factors driving behavior such as financial incentives, regulation and legislation, or levels of information, to drive actual behavior and ultimately feed back into underlying cultural capital. Read more...- In cultural studies, media culture refers to the current Western capitalist society that emerged and developed from the 20th century, under the influence of mass media. The term alludes to the overall impact and intellectual guidance exerted by the media (primarily TV, but also the press, radio and cinema), not only on public opinion but also on tastes and values.
The alternative term mass culture conveys the idea that such culture emerges spontaneously from the masses themselves, like popular art did before the 20th century. The expression media culture, on the other hand, conveys the idea that such culture is the product of the mass media. Another alternative term for media culture is "image culture." Read more... - Philosophy of culture is a branch of philosophy that examines the essence and meaning of culture. Read more...
- Culturomics is a form of computational lexicology that studies human behavior and cultural trends through the quantitative analysis of digitized texts. Researchers data mine large digital archives to investigate cultural phenomena reflected in language and word usage. The term is an American neologism first described in a 2010 Science article called Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books, co-authored by Harvard researchers Jean-Baptiste Michel and Erez Lieberman Aiden.
Michel and Aiden helped create the Google Labs project Google Ngram Viewer which uses n-grams to analyze the Google Books digital library for cultural patterns in language use over time. Read more...
Multi-lingual sign outside the mayor's office in Novi Sad, written in the four official languages of the city: Serbian, Hungarian, Slovak, and Pannonian Rusyn.
"Cultural mosaic" (French: "la mosaïque culturelle") is the mix of ethnic groups, languages, and cultures that coexist within society. The idea of a cultural mosaic is intended to suggest a form of multiculturalism, different from other systems such as the melting pot, which is often used to describe nations like the United States' assimilation. Read more...- Cultural contracts refer to the degree that cultural values are exchanged between groups. It extends identity negotiation theory and uncertainty reduction theory by focusing defining the negotiation experience from the perspective of minority groups when dealing with majority cultural norms. Cultural contracts theory was developed in 1999 by Dr. Ronald L. Jackson, an identity scholar and a professor in media and cinema studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. Read more...
- Cultural conflict is a type of conflict that occurs when different cultural values and beliefs clash. It has been used to explain violence and crime. Read more...
- Cultural assimilation is the process in which a minority group or culture comes to resemble those of a dominant group. The term is used to refer to both individuals and groups; the latter case can refer to a range of social groups, including ethnic minorities, immigrants, indigenous peoples, and other marginalized groups such as sexual minorities who adapt to being culturally dominated by another societal group.
Cultural assimilation may involve either a quick or a gradual change depending on circumstances of the group. Full assimilation occurs when members of a society become indistinguishable from those of the dominant group. Read more...
The term culture war or culture conflict has different meanings depending on the time and place where it is used, as it relates to conflicts relevant to a specific area and era.
Originally, it refers to the conflict between traditionalist, classical liberal, or conservative values and social democratic, progressive or social liberal values in the Western world, as well as other countries. Culture wars have influenced the debate over history, science and other curricula in all societies around the world.
It has come to signify different matters in modern United States, Canada, Australia, Europe, and generally, all over the world. Read more...
A culture hero is a mythological hero specific to some group (cultural, ethnic, religious, etc.) who changes the world through invention or discovery. A typical culture hero might be credited as the discoverer of fire, or agriculture, songs, tradition, law or religion, and is usually the most important legendary figure of a people, sometimes as the founder of its ruling dynasty.This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (August 2017) (Learn how and when to remove this template message)
In some cultures, there are dualistic myths, featuring two culture heroes arranging the world in a complementary manner. Dualistic cosmologies are present in all inhabited continents and show great diversity: they may feature culture heroes, but also demiurges (exemplifying dualistic creation myths in the latter case), or other beings; the two heroes may compete or collaborate; they may be conceived as neutral or contrasted as good versus evil; be of the same importance or distinguished as powerful versus weak; be brothers (even twins) or be not relatives at all. Read more...- An archaeological culture is a recurring assemblage of artifacts from a specific time and place that may constitute the material culture remains of a particular past human society. The connection between the artifacts is based on archaeologists' understanding and interpretation and does not necessarily relate to real groups of humans in the past. The concept of archaeological culture is fundamental to culture-historical archaeology. Read more...
The transition of communication technology: oral culture, manuscript culture, print culture, and Information Age
Manuscript culture uses manuscripts to store and disseminate information; in the West, it generally preceded the age of printing. In early manuscript culture, monks copied manuscripts by hand. They copied not just religious works, but a variety of texts including some on astronomy, herbals, and bestiaries. Medieval manuscript culture deals with the transition of the manuscript from the monasteries to the market in the cities, and the rise of universities. Manuscript culture in the cities created jobs built around the making and trade of manuscripts, and typically was regulated by universities. Late manuscript culture was characterized by a desire for uniformity, well-ordered and convenient access to the text contained in the manuscript, and ease of reading aloud. This culture grew out of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) and the rise of the Devotio Moderna. It included a change in materials (switching from vellum to paper), and was subject to remediation by the printed book, while also influencing it. Read more...- Cross-cultural psychiatry (also known as transcultural psychiatry or cultural psychiatry) is a branch of psychiatry concerned with the cultural context of mental disorders and the challenges of addressing ethnic diversity in psychiatric services. It emerged as a coherent field from several strands of work, including surveys of the prevalence and form of disorders in different cultures or countries; the study of migrant populations and ethnic diversity within countries; and analysis of psychiatry itself as a cultural product.
The early literature was associated with colonialism and with observations by asylum psychiatrists or anthropologists who tended to assume the universal applicability of Western psychiatric diagnostic categories. A seminal paper by Arthur Kleinman in 1977 followed by a renewed dialogue between anthropology and psychiatry, is seen as having heralded a "new cross-cultural psychiatry". However, Kleinman later pointed out that culture often became incorporated in only superficial ways, and that for example 90% of DSM-IV categories are culture-bound to North America and Western Europe, and yet the "culture-bound syndrome" label is only applied to "exotic" conditions outside Euro-American society. Read more... - Cultural diplomacy a type of public diplomacy and soft power that includes the "exchange of ideas, information, art, language and other aspects of culture among nations and their peoples in order to foster mutual understanding". The purpose of cultural diplomacy is for the people of a foreign nation to develop an understanding of the nation's ideals and institutions in an effort to build broad support for economic and political goals. In essence "cultural diplomacy reveals the soul of a nation", which in turn creates influence. Though often overlooked, cultural diplomacy can and does play an important role in achieving national security efforts. Read more...
- Cultural deprivation is a theory in sociology where a person has inferior norms, values, skills and knowledge. The theory states that people of the working class experience cultural deprivation and this disadvantages them, as a result of which the gap between classes increases.
For example, in education, lower-class students suffer from cultural deprivation as their parents do not know the best school for their child but middle-class parents know the system and so send their children to the best school for them. This puts the lower-class students at a disadvantage, thus increasing inequality and the gap between middle-class and lower-class students. Read more...
The transition of communication technology: oral culture, manuscript culture, print culture, and Information Age
Print culture embodies all forms of printed text and other printed forms of visual communication. One prominent scholar in the field is Elizabeth Eisenstein, who contrasted print culture, which appeared in Europe in the centuries after the advent of the Western printing-press (and much earlier in China where woodblock printing was used from 594 AD), to scribal culture. Walter Ong, by contrast, has contrasted written culture, including scribal, to oral culture. Ong is generally considered one of the first scholars to define print culture in contrast to oral culture. These views are related as the printing press brought a vast rise in literacy, so that one of its effects was simply the great expansion of written culture at the expense of oral culture. The development of printing, like the development of writing itself, had profound effects on human societies and knowledge. "Print culture" refers to the cultural products of the printing transformation.
In terms of image-based communication, a similar transformation came in Europe from the fifteenth century on with the introduction of the old master print and, slightly later, popular prints, both of which were actually much quicker in reaching the mass of the population than printed text. Read more...- A cultural movement is a change in the way a number of different disciplines approach their work. This embodies all art forms, the sciences, and philosophies. Historically, different nations or regions of the world have gone through their own independent sequence of movements in culture, but as world communications have accelerated this geographical distinction has become less distinct. When cultural movements go through revolutions from one to the next, genres tend to get attacked and mixed up, and often new genres are generated and old ones fade. These changes are often reactions against the prior cultural form, which typically has grown stale and repetitive. An obsession emerges among the mainstream with the new movement, and the old one falls into neglect – sometimes it dies out entirely, but often it chugs along favored in a few disciplines and occasionally making reappearances (sometimes prefixed with "neo-").
There is continual argument over the precise definition of each of these periods, and one historian might group them differently, or choose different names or descriptions. As well, even though in many cases the popular change from one to the next can be swift and sudden, the beginning and end of movements are somewhat subjective, as the movements did not spring fresh into existence out of the blue and did not come to an abrupt end and lose total support, as would be suggested by a date range. Thus use of the term "period" is somewhat deceptive. "Period" also suggests a linearity of development, whereas it has not been uncommon for two or more distinctive cultural approaches to be active at the same time. Historians will be able to find distinctive traces of a cultural movement before its accepted beginning, and there will always be new creations in old forms. So it can be more useful to think in terms of broad "movements" that have rough beginnings and endings. Yet for historical perspective, some rough date ranges will be provided for each to indicate the "height" or accepted time span of the movement. Read more... - Culturgen is a term coined in 1980 by two American scientists, the biomathematician Charles J. Lumsden and the
sociobiologist E. O. Wilson, to denote a hypothetical 'unit' of culture, in their controversial attempt to analyse cultural evolution by using techniques borrowed from population genetics, and to infer a theory of evolution of the human mind. It effectively means much the same as the older term "cultural trait" used by anthropologists, and offers similar difficulties of identification and definition. The fullest exposition of their theory appeared in their book Genes, Mind, and Culture: the coevolutionary process (1981), which received many reviews in the scientific press, many of them highly negative; it was re-issued in 2005 with a review of subsequent developments. The term has declined in popularity, and the older term meme (coined by Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene (1976)) is now used in its stead almost universally (even by Wilson in his later writings).
For a discussion of the concept, see Meme. Read more... - A cultural critic is a critic of a given culture, usually as a whole and typically on a radical basis. There is significant overlap with social and cultural theory. Read more...
- According to international organizations such as UNESCO and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), cultural industries (sometimes also known as "creative industries") combine the creation, production, and distribution of goods and services that are cultural in nature and usually protected by intellectual property rights. Read more...
Portraits of Native Americans from the Cherokee, Cheyenne, Choctaw, Comanche, Iroquois, and Muscogee tribes in European attire. Photos date from 1868 to 1924.
Acculturation is the process of social, psychological, and cultural change that stems from the balancing of two cultures while adapting to the prevailing culture of the society. Individuals of a differing culture try to incorporate themselves into the new more prevalent culture by participating in aspects of the more prevalent culture, such as their traditions, but still hold onto their original cultural values and traditions. The effects of acculturation can be seen at multiple levels in both the devotee of the prevailing culture and those who are assimilating into the culture.
At this group level, acculturation often results in changes to culture, religious practices, healthcare, and other social institutions. There are also significant ramifications on the food, clothing, and language of those becoming introduced to the overarching culture. Read more...- Cultural emphasis is an important aspect of a culture which is often reflected though language and, more specifically, vocabulary (Ottenheimer, 2006, p. 266). This means that the vocabulary people use in a culture indicates what is important to that group of people. If there are a lot of words to describe a certain topic in a specific culture, then there is a good chance that that topic is considered important to that culture. Read more...
- Cultural mediation describes a profession that studies the cultural differences between people, using the data in problem solving.
It is one of the fundamental mechanisms of distinctly human development according to cultural–historical psychological theory introduced by Lev Vygotsky and developed in the work of his numerous followers worldwide. Read more... - Cultural geography is a subfield within human geography. Though the first traces of the study of different nations and cultures on Earth can be dated back to ancient geographers such as Ptolemy or Strabo, cultural geography as academic study firstly emerged as an alternative to the environmental determinist theories of the early Twentieth century, which had believed that people and societies are controlled by the environment in which they develop. Rather than studying pre-determined regions based upon environmental classifications, cultural geography became interested in cultural landscapes. This was led by Carl O. Sauer (called the father of cultural geography), at the University of California, Berkeley. As a result, cultural geography was long dominated by American writers.
Geographers drawing on this tradition see cultures and societies as developing out of their local landscapes but also shaping those landscapes. This interaction between the natural landscape and humans creates the cultural landscape. This understanding is a foundation of cultural geography but has been augmented over the past forty years with more nuanced and complex concepts of culture, drawn from a wide range of disciplines including anthropology, sociology, literary theory, and feminism. No single definition of culture dominates within cultural geography. Regardless of their particular interpretation of culture, however, geographers wholeheartedly reject theories that treat culture as if it took place "on the head of a pin". Read more... - Cultural nationalism is a form of nationalism in which the nation is defined by a shared culture. It is an intermediate position between ethnic nationalism and civic nationalism. Therefore, it focuses on a national identity shaped by cultural traditions, but not on the concepts of common ancestry or race.
"Cultural nationalism" does not tend to manifest itself in independent movements, but is a moderate position within a larger spectrum of nationalist ideology.
Thus, moderate positions in Flemish, Hindu[dubious – discuss] nationalisms can be "cultural nationalism" while these same movements also include forms of ethnic nationalism and national mysticism. Read more... - Cultural radicalism (Danish: Kulturradikalisme) was a movement in first Danish, but later also Norwegian culture. It was particular strong in the Interwar Period, but its philosophy has its origin in the 1870s and a great deal of modern social commentary still refer to it.
At the time of the height of the cultural radical movement it was referred to as modern. The words cultural radical and cultural radicalism was first used in an essay by Elias Bredsdorff in the broadsheet newspaper, Politiken, in 1956. Bredsdorff described cultural radicals as people who are socially responsible with an international outlook. Read more... - A subculture is a group of people within a culture that differentiates itself from the parent culture to which it belongs, often maintaining some of its founding principles. Subcultures develop their own norms and values regarding cultural, political and sexual matters. Subcultures are part of society while keeping their specific characteristics intact. Examples of subcultures include hippies, goths and bikers. The concept of subcultures was developed in sociology and cultural studies. Subcultures differ from countercultures. Read more...
- Theology of culture is a branch of theology that studies culture and cultural phenomenas. It lies close to philosophy of culture, but has focus more on existentialism and spiritualism.
Paul Tillich was the first theologian who wrote about the theology of culture. He discussed about making difference between the sacred and the secular. Nowadays, the theology of culture also deals with cultural differences between religions and thus shares many features with the theology of religions. Read more...
Cultural imperialism comprises the cultural aspects of imperialism. “Imperialism” here refers to the creation and maintenance of unequal relationships between civilizations, favoring a more powerful civilization. Thus, cultural imperialism is the practice of promoting and imposing a culture, usually that of a politically powerful nation, over a less powerful society; in other words, the cultural hegemony of industrialized or economically influential countries which determine general cultural values and standardize civilizations throughout the world. The term is employed especially in the fields of history, cultural studies, and postcolonial theory. It is usually used in a pejorative sense, often in conjunction with calls to reject such influence. Cultural imperialism can take various forms, such as an attitude, a formal policy, or military action, insofar as it reinforces cultural hegemony. Read more...- Cultural learning, also called cultural transmission, is the way a group of people or animals within a society or culture tend to learn and pass on information. Learning styles are greatly influenced by how a culture socializes with its children and young people. Cross-cultural research in the past fifty years has primarily focused on differences between Eastern and Western cultures (Chang, et al., 2010). Some scholars believe that cultural learning differences may be responses to the physical environment in the areas in which a culture was initially founded (Chang, et al., 2010). These environmental differences include climate, migration patterns, war, agricultural suitability, and endemic pathogens. Cultural evolution, upon which cultural learning is built, is believed to be a product of only the past 10,000 years and to hold little connection to genetics (Chang, et al., 2010).
Cultural learning allows individuals to acquire skills that they would be unable to independently over the course of their lifetimes (Van Schaik & Burkart, 2011). Cultural learning is believed to be particularly important for humans. Humans are weaned at an early age compared to the emergence of adult dentition (MacDonald, 2007). The immaturity of dentition and the digestive system, the time required for growth of the brain, the rapid skeletory growth needed for the young to reach adult height and strength means that children have special digestive needs and are dependent on adults for a long period of time (MacDonald, 2007). This time of dependence also allows time for cultural learning to occur before passage into adulthood. Read more...
Cultural anthropology is a branch of anthropology focused on the study of cultural variation among humans. It is in contrast to social anthropology, which perceives cultural variation as a subset of the anthropological constant.
Cultural anthropology has a rich methodology, including participant observation (often called fieldwork because it requires the anthropologist spending an extended period of time at the research location), interviews, and surveys. Read more...
Did you know...
- ... that both towns connected by the 1931 opening of the Perley Bridge declared a half-day holiday to start at noon?
- ... that the Easter hymn "Das Grab ist leer, der Held erwacht" (The tomb is empty, the hero awake) from 1777 has been called a hit among church songs?
- ... that the Advent hymn "O Heiland, reiß die Himmel auf" was written against a backdrop of the Thirty Years' War, the plague, and witch trials?
- ... that Ethiopian women's rights activist Nahu Senay Girma's given name means "something good is happening now" and is traditionally a masculine name?
- ... that the kaep is a traditional type of proa sailboat native to Palau that can be sailed forward or backward?
- ... that Kent Nagano commissioned Jörg Widmann's oratorio Arche for the opening celebrations of the Elbphilharmonie, and conducted 300 performers in the premiere?
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Selected images
Celebrations, rituals and patterns of consumption are important aspects of folk culture.
Petroglyphs in modern-day Gobustan, Azerbaijan, dating back to 10,000 BCE and indicating a thriving culture
An Assyrian child wearing traditional clothing.
Human symbolic expression developed as prehistoric humans reached behavioral modernity.
British poet and critic Matthew Arnold viewed "culture" as the cultivation of the humanist ideal.
Adolf Bastian developed a universal model of culture.
A 19th-century engraving showing Australian natives opposing the arrival of Captain James Cook in 1770
British anthropologist Edward Tylor was one of the first English-speaking scholars to use the term culture in an inclusive and universal sense.
The Beatles exemplified changing cultural dynamics, not only in music, but fashion and lifestyle. Over a half century after their emergence, they continue to have a worldwide cultural impact.
Social and political organization varies between different cultures.
Johann Herder called attention to national cultures.
In the news
- 15 January 2019 – Prayagraj Kumbh 2019
- The largest human gathering in the world, the Kumbh Mela festival, starts at Prayagraj (previously known as Allahabad), India. More than 120 million Hindu devotees, as well as tourists, are expected. (The Guardian)
- 13 January 2019 –
- A man stabs the Mayor of Gdańsk, Paweł Adamowicz, on stage at a Great Orchestra of Christmas Charity event in Gdańsk, Poland. (The Guardian)
- 6 January 2019 –
- The death toll from a storm that devastated the Philippines shortly after Christmas rises to 126. (News24)
- 5 January 2019 – 2018 Moscow–Constantinople schism
- Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople Bartholomew I signs the independence decree ('tomos') officially separating the Ukrainian Orthodox Church from the Russian Orthodox Church as autocephalous Church. (NPR)
- 2 January 2019 – China–United States trade war (2018–present)
- American electronics maker Apple warns that iPhone sales are slowing significantly and the product is in weak demand, blaming trade tensions with China. The company says that it has lowered its expected fiscal earnings for the first quarter as a result, citing disappointing holiday sales figures, and that it could lose $9 billion due to the decline. (The Verge)
- 2 January 2019 – Indigenous territories of Brazil
- President of Brazil Jair Bolsonaro issues a decree to place the responsibility for "identification, delimitation, demarcation and registration of lands traditionally occupied by indigenous people" at the Ministry of Agriculture, instead of the indigenous peoples affairs agency, FUNAI. The management of public forests also goes to the agriculture ministry. The move is seen as a big win for the industrial agribusiness lobby. (Reuters)
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